Walking Through An Khe
by Spotlight Effect
Summary: <html><head></head>"In 1968 a draft card came for him.  Alfred was unusually calm, somber even, playing out the odds and ends in his head. It's a sign, a call to justice, he said, somethin' big, somethin' great."  M for language, themes, death, and violence. No pairings.</html>


**I believe Vietnam was a prime example of American paranoia and stupidity when it came to dealing with Communism. Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers and over one million Vietnamese killed in fifteen-odd years only to have the country unite as a Communist state. I'd call that a right-hard kick in the testicles.**

**Anywho. This will be sort of a story dump that centers around the Vietnam war and shit. You may find a plot, if you look hard enough.**

**Oh, and just a heads up: this has many human parts, I guess I could say. They aren't OCs by any means, just names and faces I've made up to make this story work.**

**4 May, 2011 EDIT:: Fixed formatting and grammatical errors. New chapter will be up soon.**

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Chapter I

Psychology

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When draft cards burned they smelled like plastic and hemp and horsehair. And they did burn, quite often, in communes and private homes, as well as on the steps of courthouses or post offices. Draft cards were of course highly flammable, though it seemed that the lower draft numbers burned brighter and faster, catching like pitch and straw from only a flash. The boys that burned them reeked of smoke and defiance for days.

Alfred Jones tried to burn his draft card in 1967. It was somewhat difficult as his draft board had yet to mail his card to him, but he tried. He tried to write his name over his friends' cards and burn them, but the ink didn't take over the type. "I feel like Warren to the first amendment," he said to his friends. "Burning away all those personal rights and rules."

He was jealous. He wanted to fight for that freedom, that zeal, that right to do what he wanted even if there was no reason why. He simply did. He felt the need to right something for himself, for his country. Burning the card would do hardly any of that, but he tried anyway.

In 1968 though, a draft card came for him in the mail. Alfred was unusually calm, somber even, playing out the odds and ends in his head. He tried to take a Zippo to his card, but each time it was like he couldn't make the fluid catch the spark. It's a sign, a call to justice, he said, somethin' big, somethin' great.

The next day he left without telling his parents.

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Karl Jennings was twenty-five and a grunt, while his commanding officer Marcus Mayes was hardly twenty-one and couldn't hold his liquor. They had their stand-offs mainly over humping through a tunnel or old foxhole when the platoon came upon one. Jennings was proud, angry, defiant of following a boy through peat bogs and jungle paths, though the cold beer and the fresh meals helicoptered in each day kept his temper under control.

Alfred Jones was also under Lt Mayes, and was younger still than Jennings, being only nineteen years old. He humped a claymore most days, quiet but content, and took up humming on the routes where Lt Mayes didn't order them to make a column or shut the hell up. Alfred's eyesight was somewhat poor and lied about it when registering at this draft board in Madras, Oregon. Somehow he managed an M1 carbine instead of an M-16, along with a bowie knife from World War Two.

And because of his M1 carbine and his World War Two knife and his far-sightendness, Jennings took it upon himself to even the playing field for the rest of the platoon, show Alfred the VC food chain, make the rest of the chumps feel better, he said.

It was over digging foxholes in a dense section of jungle fifty miles northwest from the An Khe base that Jennings got his chance. The noises in that section of jungle were like a constant hissing and acidic burn that seeped into the frazzled brains of Lt Mayes and Jennings and Alfred, and especially Rick Thompson and Joey Carino who kept smoking dope and firing off smoke grenades midday.

"Fucking _shit_, man, there's no way in hell I'm digging a pit out here," Alfred said.

Jennings wouldn't have any of that and most of the men in the platoon saw that. "You better dig your pit," he said, "because I have to dig a pit in this shithole, then so do you." Jennings cocked his Uzi that he had stolen off a man who had his face blown off a week or so before. "I swear to fucking god, Jones, if you don't dig that foxhole I'll do it myself with a chain of brass and your fucking innards."

Joey Carino laughed and sucked on his stub of a joint.

"Then shoot me, man. There isn't a fuckin' red or a charlie out in this goddamned jungle that ain't gonna see a hole in the middle of a carpet of vines and shit." Alfred was out of it, a space cadet at this point, from all the second-hand pot he'd inhaled from Joey Carino and Rick Thompson. "I can _hear_ 'em," he said. "And they're sayin' they'll fuckin' find me in my pit in the middle of the god damned night."

Lt Mayes stayed silent and out of Jennings path, instead cleaning his Grease Gun and chewing on tobacco he packed in the mesh on the outside of his helmet.

"Christ almighty," said Jennings. "This ain't fucking about the Soviets. This ain't about the fuckin' VC in the bushes. This about getting your sorry ass on the ground, diggin' a pit like your CO said to. Christ almighty."

"I told you, man, I'm not getting into a damned hole."

Jennings let off three rounds from his Uzi into Alfred's foot, partly to scare him, partly to order him to move, and partly to make himself feel better.

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There was this medic in the platoon, an Englishman who lived in Canada, got drafted, shipped out, and ended up spending the malleable part of his life pumping Americans full of morphine and putting sutures into their legs. He stayed quiet most of the time much like Alfred Jones, though his quiet wasn't something happy nor neurotic; his kind of quiet was one of awe and resignation, letting the steam and jungle and mud wash over and into his body, taking up his throat so that no words came out. It was reverence, Lt Mayes said. He's aware, waiting, unlike the rest of you.

The medic was Arthur Kirkland, and it was true, he did somewhat revere the feel of Vietnam, the softness of the earth and the leaves in the jungle. He humped morphine and extra compression bandages, and gauze, and rolls of cotton, and a bowie knife, and a deck of playing cards. He tried to collect things from the rounds, maybe finding oddly-shaped or coloured stones when they dug their foxholes near the rivers or mountains. He humped those too, in his pack, so that when they passed through a group of shacks or a small village, maybe even just the vicinity of a pagoda, he would try to trade them in for something to drink, a shot or even a whiff of alcohol.

Jennings liked Arthur Kirkland because of this loyalty to his alcoholism, to his embrace of his hometown leisures. "Guys like him don't get messed with down here," Jennings said. "They're all ready fucked over by some other addiction––no point in trying to scare them out of it."

It was Arthur Kirkland who gave immediate care to Alfred Jones after Jennings shot him thrice in the foot for not digging his foxhole. Neither of them said anything to the other. Instead Alfred spat ramblings and animalistic grunts into the forest. He was high from adrenaline and blood loss; from too much dope and not enough morphine.

Holy god, holy god, he shot me, the bastard fuckin' _shot_ me, Alfred said. Yes, I can see that, now quiet up, Arthur Kirkland said. But he god damned shot me, right in the foot, in the middle of some shithole forest, Alfred said. Stop moving so I can pull the damned things out, Arthur Kirkland said.

Geoff Sherwin, who humped the twenty-seven pound radio, was starting to call a heli-evac when the first shots started. The rounds were clipped and staccato, bouncing off the dampness of the leaves to echo farther down the mountains and ravines. No one had a foxhole because they all stopped to watch Jennings shoot Alfred in the foot, and then watch Arthur Kirkland try to sew Alfred back together while they waited for the chopper.

Joey Carino was still too high, so he hardly felt the two .50 calibre rounds tear through his skull and neck. Fuck, thought Lt Mayes, tank artillery. Christ almighty, thought Jennings. Rick Thompson was a few feet behind Joey Carino's body and fragmented skull, and stood stock still while more fire rained down on the platoon. He started to rail of rounds with his Greaser. He was erratic, unpredictable, targeting trees and rivers and even Joey Carino's dead body.

Jennings ran off with his Uzi, tossing smoke grenades in his wake. "Fuckin' Soviets, fuckin' Charlie!" and he was gone.

Lt Mayes had a foxhole, unlike the rest of the platoon, and tried to seek cover within it. Arthur Kirkland watched him wriggle down like a lungfish into the moldering earth with his gun before him.

Alfred's foot was still bleeding, would probably need to be amputated, but the time didn't feel right for it, Arthur Kirkland thought. He watched Lt Mayes squirm into his foxhole instead, watched him turn about and begin to prattle shots off with Rick Thompson and maybe Jennings, if Jennings was even anywhere near them, if Jennings was even alive, and if Jennings had the brass balls to actually shoot the Viet Cong of the Soviets, or who ever the hell was firing at them. Arthur Kirkland had his own weapon, sure, but both of his hands were still on the morphine needle and the compression bandage on Alfred's foot, and so he watched.

Geoff Sherwin still had his radio, though now he and it were behind a huge ivy-covered tree that was down a slight embankment not twenty feet from where the platoon was supposed to camp for the night. He had tossed the thing below him like some sort of landlocked buoy or life ring, then jostled his M-16 and started to scan the trees. Because, shit, this is Vietnam, he thought, and even the trees will try to kill you, the air, the water, the very clothes on your back with try to spring up and choke you to death. So Geoff Sherwin held his M-16 up and at the ready with his radio below him.

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The firing stopped just as suddenly, with Lt Mayes, Alfred, Arthur Kirkland, Geoff Sherwin, Rick Thompson, and give or take Jennings, all stuck in a haze of gun powder and echoes. The air was so busy it hurt, and Alfred's leg seemed to bleed out even faster. The sun was sinking and the land was ticking too quickly and too loudly. Rick Thompson was bleeding out from his leg and right shoulder, and his Greaser was hanging awkwardly from his left arm.

There were two dead Viet Cong boys laid next to one another at the opposite end of the trail, nigh twenty feet from the only foxhole––Lt Mayes's foxhole. One of them was strangely old, his face wrinkled and brown and folded, but his body and hands were smooth like a woman's, almost pear shaped in its refinement. The other was hardly older than twelve or so, Micheal Sims, a the self-proclaimed sharpshooter, guessed. The rifle Rick Thompson snatched from him as soon as he fell from his tree was nearly the same size as his body.

Lt Mayes wandered down and up the trail in front of Arthur Kirkland and Alfred, pacing and shaking his head every three steps. He counted, one, two, three, out loud, then shook his head like a whip or a ricochet and rubbed his arms. Joey Carino was dead, that was obvious, Alfred was shot thrice in the foot, Arthur Kirkland was mad, and Jennings was off in the forest with the Uzi, probably shooting birds or mongooses. A damn right mess, Lt Mayes thought.

The radio was put out by the force of Geoff Sherwin's tousling. Lt Mayes tried to call back to the An Khe base but all he got was static. Static and Geoff Sherwin's sigh, and maybe Rick Thompson's nervous laughing.

"Here we go, here we go," Rick Thompson said as Lt Mayes passed him for the fifth time. "Here we go, runnin' the race, breaking the tape at the end of the tunnel. That right, Mister Mayes? Mister Marcus Mayes?" There was blood on his face. Blood, probably Joey Carino's blood. He still stank of weed.

"Shut it," Arthur said.

"Nah man, here we _fuckin' go_. Up those big green Viet Cong mountains. Jennings'll get it. He gets that shit."

"Shut it, you prat––"

"Man, fuck you, this is Nam." Rick Thompson nibbled on this thumb nail and watched his commanding officer pace the trail.

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It was cold at night, and the bodies stunk and attracted too many bugs. Alfred's foot had stopped bleeding before the platoon had to pull their ponchos out for the night, Lt Mayes finally got his remaining men to dig their holes––even a larger one for Arthur Kirkland and Alfred––and hold tight.

The mountains to the west looked peaceful in the night, like a silent vacuum of solid dark that drew all the evil of the land into themselves. Who ever crept through the forests of the slopes were complete shadows, overcast by the presence of the land, the smell, the air, the sound of motors and mortars. They were runny and wet like the bogs of the land, but running backwards, into themselves, to take the horrid stench of war up and out.

The two VC soldiers––they both weren't men, and they both weren't boys, but even soldier was a stretch when all they had was each other, a canvas bag of rice, and one rifle between them––were put as far away as possible from Joey Carino's body. They covered them with under brush and large-leafed branches. Joey Carino had his own poncho.

"I can't really remember his face," Alfred said. Their foxhole was larger than most but still tight about the shoulders. The two boys that shared it shifted around each other, minding a foot with two bullets still in it. The third was in Alfred's hands.

Arthur finished tucking away his game of solitaire and turned. " 'He' who?"

"Y'know. Him. That Carino kid. Joey Carino. The grassy fellow."

"The grassy fellow?"

"Yeah yeah, the dope guy. Good shit, too. How the hell he keeps it––well, kept it––I'll never know." Alfred turned, played with the dirt and looked at his raised and wrapped foot. "I'm gonna die, just like him," he said.

Pish posh, Arthur thought. You won't die, you'll be fine. Lose a foot, but you'll be fine. Win a medal or something; you Americans are always fond of your medals, you lot are, he thought. "I don't know," he said.

Don't fret yourself, he said.

You'll get back up, maybe you'll keep the foot, he said.

Alfred stayed quiet.

"Just make sure I'm not dumped in the face or left under my poncho." Alfred turned on his side, awkward in the hole, and covered his face in the Vietnam dirt. "And write something nice to my parents; Mayes ain't gonna do it. I might be young, but I can tell when someone doesn't know jack shit, and he don't know jack shit. Nice guy, but a dumb guy. 'Sides, you're British. You guys are good at writing pretty."

Arthur scoffed. "You have me down to tee."

"And you _drink_ tea, not this beer and canteen stuff. Real fine stuff, am I right?"

"I even make jelly molds in my spare time, and weave doilies." Arthur checked the bandage wrap on Alfred's foot, looking for bleeds and muck.

"You should weave a placemat outta some VC vines, man," Alfred said. "Then we'd be real classy, humpin' our own fine china." He laughed. "Shit man, I'm getting me some VC placemats made by an Englishman before they chopper my body outta here."

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**Balls McGee.**

**Ahem. Short chapter for short intro. Note there will be no regular updates. Length will vary ((but I can promise always above 1000 words)). **

**Though I can say that if I get reviews and interested followers/peeps, then maybe I will try to update faster. Cool beans.**

**Over and out.**


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